Pictures of Health

Answers to the Challenge

By Charles Buchanan

Stephen Russell, M.D., a UAB assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics, challenges medical students to hone their observation skills by studying works of art in a popular new course. (Read more about the course in the print edition of the summer 2012 issue of UAB Medicine magazine.) How well did you do in spotting the medical abnormality in The Virgin and Child with Canon von der Paele, a 15th-century painting by Jan van Eyck? Here is the solution to the medical mystery: